Saturday, August 9, 2008

A Canadian ridicules American gun rights

Lawrence wrote: Since gun control advocates have attempted to institute legislation favoring their position, this matter has been hotly debated in congress from time to time, but the fact that the founding fathers, the originators of the Second Amendment meant a certain thing by it weighs heavily against gun control and gun control makes little headway. The above is an analysis from a congressional subcommittee on gun control. It is especially interesting because in it one can find a history of the thinking that led up to the Second Amendment.

A Certain Canadian responded with: “The Second Amendment seems to be as outdated and as relevant as the "rules" in The Bible against eating certain things or menstruating women attending church. The liklihood that the reason that you need a gun is to form an armed militia against a tyrannical government is very low. It's interesting that the answer to "why do you have a gun?" and "why should you be allowed to have a gun?" are very different. The answer to the first is so you can shoot people if they "get too close" or try to take your stuff. The answer to the second is because your fore-fathers lived in a renegade society where you needed to be able to form militias against certain other factions... and now you extend it to the ludicrous argument: so you can shoot _government_ people if they try to take your stuff.

Lawrence responded to the Canadian with: It is interesting that you find some of our rights outdated. How condescending of you. The likelihood that we may ever have a tyranny may be low, but so what? Our founding fathers were worried about it. The world still has tyrannies. Nothing in existence precludes having one here. Thanks for your interest, but we’ll just keep our Second Amendment until human nature changes.

I’m not extending the Second Amendment to anything. I’m describing why the Second Amendment exists, but it exists now because we are free men. It exists because we the people have the power here in America – at least so far. Yes, I know you’d like us to give up our guns and become like Europeans, but it isn’t our way – at least not the way of most of us – although Leftist-pacifistic beliefs in big-government which controls people from cradle to grave is making inroads here as it is in Europe.

Do you really think the world is now so safe and peaceful that Americans can give up their guns? I know Europeans and their cohorts, guarded by gun-toting Americans during the Cold War think that we should dispense with them. They have a lot of opinions we find strange. We don’t need to justify why we have guns. We have them because we are entitled to them. I would rather ask why you don’t have them? Doesn’t your government trust you with them? We (still, thankfully, the majority of us) on the other hand don’t trust leaders that want to take this right away from us.